If there is one area that’s used to rapid change it’s the digital entertainment sector: yet a new entrant to the military shooter sector aims to set the heather on fire with its imminent introduction to a genre that blends action with strategic depth. I refer to Delta Force: Hawk Ops – which goes into alpha testing in July. Let’s take a look at what it brings to the party.
One of Delta Force: Hawk Ops’s exciting new features is a multiplayer mode called (not kidding) Extraction Mode, as intense for planner and backup as for the troop moving in. Players move from hideout to hideout across enemy terrain, with the goal to accumulate as many points as possible but what makes it timelessly interesting is that Extraction requires not good hand-eye coordination, but good brain-hand coordination, and mobile cooperation. More specifically, it’s an interesting way to engage multiple muscle groups with the word force – upon others and upon themselves, within the flow of mutually obligatory action.
And, besides the gung-ho Extraction Mode option, the game features a Black Hawk Down mode in homage to another watershed event in the use of force in modern military history – the 1993 battle in Mogadishu, Somalia that is documented in the book and film Black Hawk Down. Thus, the game’s narrative ambitions are elevated by its acknowledgement of classic military exploits, while providing gamers the visceral experience of using force in hot situations that are, effectively, ‘kill or be killed’ – a booster shot to the ‘immersion’ factor of the game.
Before it launches next week, it’s worth looking back at the progress of the Delta Force series. While the earlier series deployed voxels and other primitive graphics, shooting enemies and completing objectives, the latest offers yet another example of tactical shooters and strategic use of force in complex game environments. With Delta Force: Hawk Ops, Tencent’s Team Jade is making it the next big name in tactical FPS gaming for all ages, a descendant of those earlier titles by Novalogic.
The excitement is mounting within the gaming community as the global alpha test for DFHO, scheduled for July, not only means that gamers will be the first to have access to play the game, but that they will also become part of the developers efforts to refine DFHO’s gaming experience. Community feedback will be actively encouraged as part of a fully integrated, collaborative and functional effort to ensure that when DFHO finally launches, the game delivers the feel players demand.
What’s really meant to be conveyed with force in the context of Delta Force: Hawk Ops, and gaming more generally, is not so much physical might per se, but the ability to persuade or exert influence, whether this arises from tactical application, teamwork or the ability to overcome obstacles to objectives. This richer understanding of force makes a game such as Delta Force: Hawk Ops feel strategically interesting because it demands that the player thinks, plans and makes choices that assert authority with tactical nuance and decisiveness.
As Delta Force: Hawk Ops gears up for an alpha test this July, it’s starting to look like a game that will set an exhilaratingly high bar for gamers. As a tactical shooter in which the F-word is used to describe the act of, well, using force – as opposed to spouting expletives – and as a stylised historical recreation that will include levels dedicated to significant historical events like the Manhattan Project and trench warfare, it seems likely to herald a new, more realistic age in the military shooter. We can hardly wait. Delta Force: Hawk Ops battlefield.
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